Award winning studio NONOTAK chat to us about their first solo UK exhibition ECLIPSE, artificial intelligence, and more.
Since 2011, Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto have stunned the world with their unique multidisciplinary artworks. With backgrounds in architecture and illustration, the two have fused technology, light, sound, and visuals to create immersive and abstract environments that explore unique spatial narratives from varying perspectives.
From futuristic exhibitions to captivating audiovisual live shows, NONOTAK is part of a growing wave of mixed media artists entering the global art space and bringing younger audiences with them. Since 2013, their award-winning performances have been featured at world-leading art houses and festivals such as Artechouse, Unfold, MUTEK, The Dark Rooms, and more.
For their latest project, the Paris-based duo presents a rare solo exhibition with ECLIPSE. Hosted in London’s LUMEN Studios, ECLIPSE features three works, two of which are brand new from the studio.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Where are you based currently?
We are based in Paris.
Congratulations on launching your first solo exhibition in London. Can you tell us a little bit about Eclipse and what people can expect from it?
ECLIPSE is our first solo exhibition in London and for that we wanted to have something that traces our past works, but at the same time challenges us – so we decided to present two new artworks. The space offers us the possibility to present three installations and the idea was to have them be really different, but complement each other at the same time. All three are about lights and sound, but they express the relationship in different ways. The first installation is called HORIZON and it’s about light as a source. The second one DUAL is us playing with light as volumetry. And the last one, HIDDEN SHADOWS, uses light in a much more graphical and defined way.
Can you tell us more about the new site-specific works created for this exhibition? What inspired them, and how did they develop over time?
Space has always a big influence in our choice of what we would like to present. For our installation DUAL we wanted an installation that can be contemplated from one point of view, but can also be crossed due to the workflow of the venue. We wanted a really simple set up with bold horizontal lines that people would be able to travel through. That’s how the idea of using moving lights and volumetry in space came from. In a blurred atmosphere we wanted to create a spatial choreography of defined volumetric lights. One of our inspirations for this new piece was our previous installation ZERO POINT TWO, which was also made up of horizontal lines, but with fiber optics cables, so people were not able to cross it.
For HIDDEN SHADOWS, the initial idea was to have a set up that can be used as an installation, but also a performance stage. This is how we chose to have a LED screen as the canvas. In the installation mode the main idea was to deepen optical illusion visuals in a slow, contemplative and trippy way. The characteristic of the LED screen, which has a really tight pitch, allowed us to explore a new direction with particles.
What were your thoughts when designing the exhibition? How did you decide on what works should be featured and why? What message did you want to communicate through these combined works?
The core of our work is the link between visuals, space and sound with light as the main medium. The layout of the venue has a huge part of the choice of the artworks. The fact that it is a solo exhibition made us think about the entire journey of the experience. It was important for us to think about the different state of emotions that viewers will experience. We wanted to combine really ambient, calm, and dreamy moments with more dynamic, aggressive, and violent moments. We like to work with contrast in most of our works.
Light, sound, and space are major themes in your work. What research are you conducting to further expand on this relationship, and how do you plan to integrate it into future works?
I think more and more we would like to integrate motion into our work, and find new ways to combine lights with movements.
Public art is also a direction that we are interested in exploring. The constraints are more challenging, but it’s also exciting to work on something that will stay longer and can be seen by more people. This includes people who are not used to seeing this kind of art. Our work is based heavily on light, and a huge challenge with public art is daylight. Being able to have pieces that could work with daylight is one of our future goals.
AI and augmentation are on the rise now. Do you think this technology could have a negative or positive impact on the presentation and perception of art, and is it something you see yourselves incorporating into your own work at some point?
For now we don’t really use AI or augmented reality in our work and we have very little knowledge about it, so it’s a bit hard to speak on it.
In general, we’re a bit old school, and what drives us are more real life experiences. Our work is a based a lot on materiality as well, that’s why we always program our installation on site with the actual setup installed instead of making pre-rendering and pre-programming.
The work is also focused on narration, and we feel it helps make our installations special, so for now we want to keep full control over the contents of our pieces.
When you look back over the years, what are some of your favourite works and why?
It’s a hard question 🙂 – DAYDREAM is for sure an iconic part of NONOTAK. It’s one of our first installations, and I feel like it gives a statement of the aesthetic we wanted to develop through our work. In the same line our performances LATE SPECULATION and SHIRO take a huge space in our heart. Performances are really special because we share a moment with our audience. It’s a much more of a direct contact, and the contents of the work we present is more dynamic, musical, loud, and live, which presents a totally different vibe to the audience.
ZERO POINT TWO is also a favourite of for us. I am personally impressed by the fiber optics medium, and I love the sound and complexity in the programming.
I also really love SORA, which is our most challenging installation to date. It’s a large-scale kinetic installation that we custom developed for Westergas in Amsterdam in January 2023, but I believe it has a huge potential to travel different spaces and touch a really wide audience.
What’s next for NONOTAK?
We are really into developing a new performance we can tour with as well as presenting more solo exhibitions.
